31—
Winter Journey

From my window seat on the Orient Express, I looked out into the distance at the snowy mountains of Switzerland as they began to sparkle in the rays of the morning sun. The heating in the compartment was working all too efficiently, and after my departure from Paris the afternoon before I had not been able to get a good night's sleep. Thoughts about the past and the future meandered through my mind. What an endless journey—this line from a song reverberated in my thoughts. The train was heading toward central Europe and would eventually take me to Vienna under the quadripartite Allied occupation. A young woman I met in Florence was there, waiting for me.

I was overwhelmed by the Italian Renaissance. Its impact on me hardly approximated anything a "sightseeing tour" might suggest. I could never have imagined the scale of its coloration or the allure of the marbles, nor dreamed of the extraordinary energy and talents they brought together to fully and richly realize the potential of the human senses. It is said that modern Europe began with the Italian Renaissance. Until one sees Venice and Florence with one's own eyes, that is just an empty statement. Even the collection of Italian paintings in the Louvre fails to do justice to the Renaissance in the profundity of its significance and the depth of its experience. Although Italy certainly did not alter my thinking, every observation I made about European culture helped define, directly or indirectly, the substance of my essential vocabulary. My own taste did not change because of that; I still preferred the fifteenth century to the height of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, and more than the fifteenth century I cherished the age of Giotto. But my experience in Italy had absolutely no relevance to my personal preferences. Once he visited Flor-

ence, the American Bernard Berenson became so captivated that he spent the rest of his life there.^[1]

From an art museum to a church, from a church to another art museum, from a room filled with the works of Fra Angelico to the next with the paintings of Lorenzo Lotto, I kept on walking as if I had been possessed. And there I saw a young woman who was walking on the same road and at the same pace as I was—a living, breathing woman among all the numerous others carved in marble. At that moment I was seized by a strong impulse to escape from the past capsulated within the art museums and into the bustling present under the sun on the streets filled with the aroma of coffee. I invited her to go up the hillside of the Boboli Gardens, which afforded a panoramic view of Florence from the top. The dark brown tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and the green dome of Santa Maria del Fiore soared skyward above layers of roofs, and the Arno River flowed below us.

"How long will you be staying in Florence?"

"Until tomorrow," she replied.

"Where will you go from here?"

"Venice."

"Would you like to go to Rome with me?" I said.

"I've just been to Rome."

"What about staying one more day and going to Siena?"

"Siena isn't on my itinerary."

"But I bet it'd be interesting. You won't regret it."

Petite and with the appearance of a student, she had with her a small camera, one that was certainly cheaper than those carried so proudly by Japanese tourists. On the hilltop, the chestnut-colored hair on her forehead fluttered in the wind.

"Do you like Strauss?" she asked suddenly.

We were both speaking in awkward English. She couldn't speak French, and I couldn't speak German.

"Well, I've listened to waltzes."

She laughed and said, "I meant Richard Strauss."

I could remember the tunes from Italian operas Grandfather had

[1] Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), a scholar and art critic of Italian Renaissance art who studied languages and literatures at Harvard, shifting to art history after his visit to Italy. He became a foremost authority on Italian Renaissance artists and bequeathed I Tatti, his eighteenth-century villa outside Florence, to Harvard; it became the Center for Italian Renaissance Culture.

hummed when I was a child, and in the Parisian opéra comique I had heard what Nagai Kafu^[*] once called "Carmen's famous melodies." But in the long interim, I had not attended any opera performance. She said that whenever she came across art that moved her, she would recall her experience with Strauss's operas.

Once the train crossed the Austrian border, an officer from the British Occupation Army came on board to check our passports and baggage. That was quickly accomplished. Outside the window, the magnificent Swiss mountains began to give way to a subtly different landscape. The steep mountain slope was closing in on the railroad tracks. Scenes of snow-covered coniferous forests, brooks, bridges, and scattered farmhouses flashed outside the window and immediately receded into the background—images of remote, rustic mountain villages that would attract neither mountaineers nor tourists. Enchanted by the scenery, I drew my face toward the window with inquisitive eyes. Several passengers had gotten off the train in Switzerland, and the only people remaining in the eight-person compartment were a young couple clasped in an embrace in the seats opposite, and me .

Siena was wonderful. We had a late lunch on a balcony where we could see the Piazza del Campo's stone-paved streets and fountain as well as the surrounding medieval architecture. (We looked for the cheapest item on the menu to order, but the high cover charge, together with the tax and the tips, ran our bill to twice the price on the menu. Moreover, there was not enough food. Fortunately, she had brought along some dried sausage, which we sliced and ate with a small knife.)

Time stood still for us as we strolled through the old city. At the outskirts of town, a solitary church stood in the evening dusk. Deep inside the dark interior of its spacious main structure, a woman in black was kneeling in prayer alone with her child. A priest who happened to be passing by said in Italian, "This is a place for prayers, not for pleasure"—or so we thought. (She said in perfectly fluent Italian, "Excuse me, but could you tell me where the train station is?" But we couldn't really figure out his reply. I always had a feeling that I understood Italian when it was spoken to me, but afterwards I realized that I had absolutely no idea about what had been said.)

The autumn days were short, and by the time we got on the train to go back to Florence, the hills and plains of Tuscany were already enveloped in darkness. We could hear some Italians singing in chorus from another compartment, and the sound of their voices blended with the

sound of the train's wheels. I ran my fingers through her soft, silky hair as I thought how we might never see each other again once our train arrived at its destination. The past we had shared—the afternoon on the hills of Florence and the day in Siena—was enough to convince us that we would not want to say farewell just like that, but not long enough to make us want to give up Rome or Venice on our itineraries. I was not thinking about the future then; I was simply totally immersed in the sensual realm of the present. The faint sensation on my fingertips permeated my entire body, and the only way I could describe that experience was to say that our hearts were one.

The extraordinarily long train of the Orient Express began its run on the plain, and the powdery snow drew oblique lines as it fell on the surface of the window. Now in the seats opposite mine, a man was explaining to a woman in French, "Now we're entering the Russian sector. The British are easy to deal with. Not so the Russians. You can never tell how long you have to wait at the border." His manner of speech suggested that he was quite familiar with the territory. His somewhat blunt statements, I suppose, might be attributed to the fact that he was from an occupying country. The woman was listening in silence. "The Russian officers speak only Russian," the man added .

After returning to Paris, I sent a postcard to the young woman I had met in Italy. When she wrote back and asked if I wanted to see Vienna, my curiosity was aroused—both about her and about the city. I was reminded of a motion picture Towa^[*] Company imported into Japan in the 1930s. In it, townswomen were dancing to waltz music with their skirts whirling like circles. A young maiden was singing "Das ist nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder" (it comes only once and never again)^[2] —the song became a hit in Tokyo—as she rode alone in a carriage speeding through the town late at night. I wanted to see the city with my own eyes.

I was also somewhat interested in comparing the occupation of Berlin with that of Vienna. At that time, tension had arisen in Berlin, while in Vienna the Russian and the Western occupation forces were able to coexist with few reports of conflicts. But getting there was certainly not easy. The whole country was divided up and occupied by four nations with only the capital, Vienna, under their joint administration. I applied for visas in Paris, but since the British, American, French, and Russian

[2] From the theme song of Erik Charell's film Der Kongress tanzt . See chapter 9, note 4.

occupation authorities all issued visas separately, the application procedure was not only tedious, the time it took was totally unpredictable. By the time I finally received all the necessary papers, it was already toward the end of the year. But since I had no serious obligations in Paris, I made a reservation on the Orient Express and, with a small amount of baggage, boarded the train at the Gare du Nord shortly before Christmas. December was a busy month in Paris; the vitality of the city could be felt in the air. In my heart, I bade farewell to Paris, but when the train started to move, my thoughts were no longer with it.

Just when I thought the train had been traveling for quite a while through the British sector, it suddenly came to a halt. There was neither a train station nor a town nearby. The conductor came around and pulled down the window shades. "There are soldiers holding automatic rifles on both sides," the man sitting opposite me said in an explanatory tone, half for the benefit of his female companion and half for me. A little later two Russian soldiers came into the compartment. That was my first time face to face with soldiers from the Red Army. Both of them were young with plain rustic features, and neither allowed any expression to show on his face. Without uttering a word, they took the passports from the man and woman sitting opposite me, looked over the pages, and returned them, again in silence. Their manners were by no means rude, but one could not quite describe them as just being businesslike—though they undoubtedly meant to conduct themselves that way. There was something strangely awkward about their demeanor.

When I handed them my passport, they examined its pages but did not return it to me right away, as they had done with the couple. Meanwhile, there was a long pause with nobody speaking a word, and then a longer pause. I told myself that there could not be anything wrong with my passport. Then, quite suddenly, one of the soldiers looked up from the passport and began to say something in Russian.

"He's asking about your nationality," the man sitting across from me explained in French.

"I'm Japanese," I said in French, but the soldiers did not understand.

Then I remembered that the local language was German, and so I repeated myself in that language. Yet the soldier holding my passport and the other one standing silently next to him showed absolutely no reaction on their faces. "Japanese," the Frenchman said in Russian, and the soldiers began to thumb through the pages of my passport again.

I felt a little anxious, but more than that I was also beginning to get

irritated by the absurdity of the whole thing. A passport is not an encyclopedia. There was not much written in it, and if one could not figure it out in three minutes, one certainly couldn't do so in three hours. Five minutes passed, then ten minutes. Finally the soldier handed back my passport in silence and walked out of the compartment. I felt relieved, but I had already broken into a sweat.

The French couple got off the train at the next stop. In their place, an elderly officer from the Red Army came in and took the window seat facing me. Suddenly I felt hungry, so I bought a hot sausage at the station, added some mustard, and ate it. Then I took out a Gauloise, taking my time smoking it as I opened the German grammar book I had bought in Paris. Even after all these years, German grammar still reminded me of the days when I had first started learning German at the First Higher School in Komaba and the dormitory life there. Part of the melody of its popular dormitory song revived in my mind, but I had forgotten almost all of its lyrics.

Sitting motionless like an Egyptian statue, the officer opposite me kept looking out the window at the incessant snowfall—that was all one could see. The train was approaching Vienna. There I was, a total stranger; the only person I knew was one young woman. The country's language was alien to my ears, and I could not even begin to imagine what its customs were like. I even found it difficult to believe that a large metropolis was soon to emerge from this endless stretch of snow. Ikyo^[*] , dépaysement, ikusanka, au bout du monde  . . .^[3] I was trying to approximate a psychological state of mind suggested by a mixture of all these Japanese and French expressions. When I found myself in an environment alien to my familiar daily routines, that would be a time for self-discovery. What lay in the depths of my emotional life? What, ultimately, were my aspirations? What would I be willing to sacrifice? And what could I expect to accomplish?

She met me at the station and, now that she was in a city she knew so well, she appeared to be even more self-confident than she had been in Italy. She had arranged for a place for me to stay in a convenient part of the old city, and on our way there from the Westbahnhof, she gave me a brief description of the city's geography. She mentioned many unfamiliar proper names I didn't quite grasp, but I can still remember the

[3] Ikyo is a somewhat poetic term for "a foreign land"; ikusanka means roughly "far, far away from home."

names of places such as Stalin Square and the Brücke der Roten Armee (Red Army bridge). Later, I noticed that while these names did appear on city trams or on maps, no Viennese referred to them as such, preferring their old names of Schwarzenbergplatz and Reichsbrücke. (Still later, when the occupation ended, these artificially imposed names disappeared the day after the foreign troops left Vienna and were openly replaced by their original names, just as one would expect.) The structural damage to the city caused by the bombings was not as severe as I had imagined. To be sure, many buildings, most notably the Vienna State Opera House, could no longer be used, but not many places had been reduced to rubble.^[4] The supply of goods was plentiful in the stores, and the city finally seemed to be on its way to recovery from the war devastation. Armed Red Army soldiers standing in pairs appeared like shadows amid the blowing storm, only to disappear the next moment in the drifting snow.

Since its regular house could no longer be used, the national opera company performed at the Theater an der Wien instead. It was there that we listened to Wagner and Alban Berg. The makeshift theater was nothing elaborate, but it had good music and a passionately enthusiastic audience. Perhaps one could even go so far as to say that music gave the Viennese something to live for. To be sure, life was hard. But precisely because of that, rather than in spite of it, opera music was not just a source of pleasure but something central to their emotional life. That evening before our excitement subsided, we came out of the theater and found that darkness had taken over the streets. Only the words "Soviet Intelligence Headquarters" shone brightly in red against the dark night sky.

During my stay in Vienna, we took a stroll around the city, visited an art museum to see Brueghel, and then walked into a large, old-fashioned café to warm our frozen hands and feet. There were only a few other customers; everything was quiet, with only an elderly waiter sitting idly in a corner staring in our direction. Afterwards, we took the city tram, passed in front of the working-class quarters of Karl Marx Hof—its name, in commemoration of so-called Austro-Marxism after World War I, survived the annexation by Germany and the war—and arrived at the

[4] The Vienna State Opera House was rebuilt and reopened in 1955 after its near destruction during an Allied bombing. Vienna suffered fifty-three Allied bombings as well as shelling from the Germans and Russians, with several thousand fatalities, more than a quarter of a million people homeless, and the destruction of a reported 20 percent of all houses.

wine-producing town of Grinzig. Buildings there had low roofs, and the windows were scraped out from the thick walls at a level just above the accumulated snow on the pavement. The clouded-up double-pane windows, the yellowish glow of lights, the clamor and the melody of the violin just faintly audible from the outside . . . Under the street lamp's cone-shaped light, glistening powdery snow from an unremitting snowfall streamed along with the wind in an uninterrupted dance. I had never before seen—and never saw again—a more lovely town in the snow. A glass of white wine and a young woman had turned my world into a realm of infinite beauty.

I took her home late every night. Even after the key turned in the lock, the large, heavy door of her house needed a hard push before it would yield with a little squeak. Again we kissed, made plans for the next day, and said good-bye.

I stayed in Vienna for a week, and then I extended my visit for another week. But I knew I could not stay there forever. I went back to the Westbahnhof and took the Orient Express back to Paris. She did not say a word when she came to see me off; she just stood under the train window, her big eyes moistened with tears. As the train started to glide quietly away, she turned and walked away in the opposite direction, never stopping or looking back. As I leaned out at the window and saw her walk away, I realized for the first time that I was in love with her.

That for me was a new experience. I thought about her day and night—the shine in her eyes, the touch of her hair, the delicate variation in the intonation of her speech, the sun in Tuscany, the snowstorm by the Danube. Remembrance now brought back memories that seemed endless. While the past was interrupted at Vienna's Westbahnhof, by no means was it to end there, because it was to be connected with everything in the future that the power of my imagination could summon. I was myself taken by surprise that one young woman—an outsider—had come into the center of my world, a development that inevitably would lead to a change in its order. This had never before happened in my life. Now I could understand very clearly that I had not been in love with the woman in Kyoto; I had merely thought I was in love with her, or perhaps I had just wished I could love her. Where would this new experience lead me? In any case, my only thought then was how to seize the next opportunity to go to Vienna again.

The opportunity came with the arrival of spring. In Paris, representatives from Japan to an international conference to be convened in Vi-

enna were looking for an interpreter to go with them. The official languages at the conference were English and French, and the itinerary included a tour of West German cities. Since by then I also knew some German, I took the job and this time arrived in Vienna from Berlin on a passenger plane.

Stadtpark in May came alive with a profusion of flowering plants, and the Vienna woods were putting on fresh green colors. In front of the baroque Schönbrunn palace, Mozart's songs and orchestral music filled the evening sky with an air of elegant optimism. We were in the midst of happiness, and we were resolved that our happiness was not to end there. Yet we had no concrete plans, just a vague notion about a future that was sure to visit us. For this reason, I was not worried about any real difficulties or impending obstacles coming our way.

At that time I was staying at Vienna's Hotel Sacher where remnants of the extravagance of a fallen empire were still evident—thick carpets, antique furniture, old paintings, gilding on the ceilings, window frames, and doors. In the restaurant on the lower floor, an elderly woman was sipping coffee all by herself, a touring American couple was examining a spread-out map, and a distinguished-looking elderly man was reading his newspaper with a magnifying glass in hand.

One morning I ordered my breakfast there, picked up a newspaper furnished for its patrons, and learned for the first time about riots in Berlin.^[5] It was reported that citizens on both sides of the city had pulled down and torn up a red flag in the eastern sector. As for the number of participants in this "anti-Communist" riot, the figure reported in the European edition of the Herald Tribune turned out to be several times higher than that in the Times of London.

[5] On June 17, 1953, Soviet tanks suppressed a general strike by the citizens of East Berlin and imposed martial law that lasted until July 12.